Undercover police officers would today never spy on their critics, Sir Bernard
Hogan-Howe has said.

The Met Police commissioner said he is "confident" that undercover officers today are not involved in any wrongdoing, after a string of revelations about the spying activities of police in previous decades.

He said it was a "disgrace" if undercover officers had indeed spied on critics of Scotland Yard corruption, as revealed by the Guardian.

The Met Police yesterday promised to investigate allegations that undercover officers were asked to dig dirt on the family of murdered teenager Stephen Lawrence and their campaign to bring his killers to justice.

However, speaking on LBC 97.3 Radio this morning, Sir Bernard also described the allegations as a "distraction" at a time when the police is cutting crime.

The police chief said he did not want today's Met to be "too damaged by things we have to discuss from the past".

He also defended the use of undercover officers as a "vital tool in our armoury" for catching criminals.

Sir Bernard took to the airwaves just hours after the latest revelations that Metropolitan police officers were sent undercover to infiltrate political groups involved in exposing corruption within Scotland Yard.

Undercover officers in the Special Demonstration Squad (SDS) targeted campaigners who were against the Metropolitan police, and who were calling for justice for people who had died in custody, according to allegations.

At least three officers from the SDS spied on London-based activist groups, including Mark Jenner, who used the identity ‘Mark Cassidy’ in the 1990s to infiltrate the Colin Roach Centre.

Campaigners at the centre, named after a 21-year-old black British man who died in the foyer of Stoke Newington police station in north-east London, worked with people who said they had been mistreated, wrongfully arrested or assaulted by police in the local borough of Hackney.

Jenner, who was married with children, also had a five-year relationship with a woman he was spying on before his undercover activities ended in 2000, the Guardian reported.

A second SDS undercover officer gathered information on another group that represented the victims of police harassment and racist attacks in a neighbouring part of east London.

Although the second spy, whose identity is not known, did not infiltrate the Newham Monitoring Project directly, he is alleged to have got inside associated groups and could monitor its activities.

The latest allegations follow claims by Peter Francis , a former Met officer turned whistleblower, who said that undercover Metropolitan police officers were sent to spy on the family of murdered teenager Stephen Lawrence in a bid to discredit them.

It also emerged in Channel 4’s documentary Dispatches on Monday night that a woman who had a child with an undercover police officer who was spying on her said she felt she was "raped by the state".

The woman, whose first name is Jacqui, said met the undercover officer Bob Lambert in 1984. At the time, Lambert was posing as animal rights activist "Bob Robinson" on behalf of the SDS.